Quaderns
portàtils

08
On the Ends
of Sleep: Shadows
in the Glare
of a 24/7 World
Jonathan Crary
 

this type of sparrow has a highly unusual capacity for staying awake for as long as seven
days during their migrations, which enables them to fly and navigate by night and forage
for nourishment by day without rest. It might, then, seem curious that the United States
Defense Department has been spending large amounts of money over the past five years
to study these creatures. University researchers with military funding at various universi-
ties, especially in Madison, Wisconsin, have been investigating the brain activity of the
birds during these long sleepless periods, in the hope of acquiring knowledge applicable
to human beings: that is, the aim is to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep
yet function productively and efficiently. The initial goal here, quite simply, is the creation
of the sleepless soldier, and the white-crowned sparrow study project is only a small part
of a much broader military effort to achieve at least limited mastery over human sleep.

On the Ends
Initiated by the advanced research division of the Pentagon (DARPA), which is credited
with the beginnings of the Internet and the Stealth fighter bomber, scientists in various
labs are conducting experimental trials of sleeplessness techniques, using neurochemi-
cals, gene therapy and even transcranial magnetic stimulation. The short-term objec-

of Sleep: Shadows
tive is the production of a combatant who can go for a minimum of seven days without
sleep; in the longer term perhaps at least double that time. They also aim to achieve
a state of sleeplessness without the cognitive or psychic deficits associated with the use

in the Glare
of amphetamines in most 20th-century wars. For the last twenty years, with early results
that have been chillingly evident, the strategic logic of future military planning has been
to extract the living individual from most parts of the command, control and execution

of a 24/7 World
circuit. However, the need for large numbers of human agents is not going to be elimi-
nated in the foreseeable future, and what we are seeing here is a recognition that it will
be necessary to design soldiers whose physical capabilities will more closely approximate
to the temporalities of non-human machines and networks. Ironically, the white-crowned

Jonathan Crary
I’m going to begin my talk with three current items:
1
If you’ve ever lived anywhere along the west coast of North America, you might know that
each year hundreds of species of birds migrate seasonally up and down for various dis-
tances along that continental shelf. One particular species of bird in this group are the
white-crowned sparrows, whose particular route takes them in the fall from Alaska all
the way to northern Mexico, and then back again every spring. Unlike most other birds,
sparrows have been plucked from the seasonal rhythms of a biosphere to facilitate the
imposition of a machinistic or robotic model of time, efficiency, and functionality onto the
human body. However, as many studies have shown, most war-related innovations are
inevitably assimilated into a broader social sphere, and the sleepless soldier would be the
forerunner of the sleepless worker or consumer. Non-sleep, when aggressively promoted
by pharmaceutical companies, would become first a lifestyle option, and eventually for
many a necessity. The worldwide infrastructure for 24-hour non-stop work and consump-
tion has been in place for at least a decade and a half: the missing ingredient is a human
subject shaped to coincide with it more intensively.
2
In the late 1990s a Russian/European space consortium announced plans to build and launch
into orbit satellites which would reflect sunlight back onto earth. The scheme, which is still
in the experimental phase, calls for a chain of nearly a hundred satellites to be placed in
 
sun-synchronized orbits at an altitude of 1.700km, each one equipped with fold-out para-
bolic reflectors of paper-thin material 200 meters in diameter. Once fully extended, each
mirror satellite would have the capacity to illuminate a fifteen-square-kilometer area on
earth with a brightness nearly a hundred times greater than moonlight. The initial motiva-
tion was to develop a means of providing illumination for industrial and natural resource
exploitation in geographical areas with long Polar nights, in Siberia and western Russia.
But since then, the company has extended the notion to providing night-time lighting for
entire cities and metropolitan areas, on the grounds that it would reduce the immense
energy costs of electric lighting. The company’s slogan pitches its product (or services)
as ‘daylight all night long.’ I was unable to discover what their revenue-generating model
was. Vocal opposition to the project sprang up immediately.
International astronomical organizations expressed dismay because of the consequences for
most earth-based space observation. Other scientific and environmental groups declared
that it would have detrimental physiological consequences for both animal and human
behavior, in that the absence of regular alternations between night and day would disrupt
various metabolic patterns, including sleep, which regulate biological activity. Lastly, there
were protests and petitions from a range of cultural and humanitarian groups, which as-
sembled arguments around the proposition that the night sky is a common possession,
to which all of humanity is entitled to have fundamental access – or to put it another way,
the ability to experience the darkness of night and observe the stars is a basic human
right that no corporation can nullify. (Though if this is some category of right or privilege,
it is already being violated for over half of the world’s population, in cities or mega-cities
that are enveloped continuously in a penumbra of smog and high-intensity illumination.)
Some defenders of the project, however, included some self-labeled ‘environmentalists’
who asserted dubiously that such technology would help lower nocturnal use of electric-
ity, and that governments should support a trade-off of the night sky and its darkness for
reduced global energy consumption. In any case, I point to this enterprise, regardless of
whether its goals are remotely achievable, simply as evidence of a contemporary vision in
which a state of permanent visibility is inseparable from the non-stop operation of global
economic activity.
3 cell that is always lit, having to wear eye- and ear-coverings that totally block out light
The last item concerns the fate of countless detainees, victims of extra-judicial rendition, and
others imprisoned and tortured in the growing network of American prison camps since
September 2001. One of the forms of torture consistently practiced by US authorities
and their foreign surrogates has been the use of sleep deprivation. The case of one
individual detainee has been widely noted, and can stand for the fate of hundreds of
others as well.
Mohammed al Qahtani was tortured according to the specifications of what is now know
as the Pentagon’s ‘First Special Interrogation Plan’ that was authorized by Donald
Rumsfeld. Qahtani was deprived of sleep for a period of over two months, during
which he was subjected to interrogations that lasted twenty hours at a time. He was
confined in tiny cubicles, in which he was unable to lie down, which were lit with
high-intensity lamps and into which loud music was blasted. Paradoxically, within the
Military Intelligence community these prisons are referred to as Dark Sites, but one of
the locations where al Qahtani was incarcerated was in fact code-named Camp Bright
Lights. This is hardly the first time sleep deprivation has been used by Americans,
and it is misleading in some ways to single it out because, for Mohammed al Qahtani
and hundreds of others, sleep deprivation was only one part of a larger program of
beatings, humiliations, prolonged restraint, and simulated drownings. Sleep depriva-
tion as torture can be traced back many centuries, but its systematic use obviously
coincides with the availability of electric lighting and the means for sound amplifica-
tion. First practiced pervasively by Stalin’s police in the 1930s, sleep deprivation is
usually the start of what the torturers themselves call ‘the conveyor belt’, organized
sequences of brutalities, of ‘useless violence’ that irreparably damages human beings.
It produces psychosis after a relatively short period of time and after several weeks
begins to cause irreversible neurological damage. It leads to an abject state of help-
lessness and compliance, in which the extraction of meaningful information from the
victim is impossible, a state in which one will confess or fabricate anything. Perhaps
it is unnecessary to state that the denial of sleep is the violent dispossession of self
by external force, the calculated shattering of an individual. Of course the United
States has long been involved in the practice of torture, directly and through person-
nel in its client regimes, but what is stunning is its smooth relocation into full public
view and its subsequent insertion into what passes for contemporary ethical debate.
Notable in discussions over the last two years has been the consistent refusal of
many American authorities even to acknowledge that sleep deprivation is torture; for
them it is merely a form of psychological persuasion. I will finally just note the widely
publicized account of the treatment of so-called enemy combatant Jose Padilla: not
just the extraordinary isolation and constraints in which he is held, not just the sleep
deprivation to which he too was subjected in the early phase of his captivity, but rather
the absolute remaking of his sensory and perceptual existence: living in a windowless
and sound whenever he is escorted out of his cell, so that he can have no awareness
of night and day, of any stimulus that could provide a clue about the ‘outside world’.
This regime of relentless perceptual management extends to the guards and handlers
who have routine daily contact with him, requiring them to be fully armored, gloved,
and helmeted with one-way Plexiglass visors so that the prisoner is denied any visible
relation to a human face or even an inch of human skin. It is the fabrication of a world
that radically excludes the possibility of care, protection or solace.
 
This particular constellation of developments taken from recent events are fragments that
provide a specific vantage point on some of the multiple consequences not only of
corporate-led globalization, including its imperial variants, but also of much longer-es-
tablished processes of Western modernization. I don’t mean to give this grouping any
privileged explanatory significance except as provisional way of characterizing some of
the paradoxes of the expanding, non-stop world of 21st-century capitalism, paradoxes
that are bound up in shifting configurations of sleep and waking, illumination and dark-
ness, of justice and terror. Perhaps it is obvious that what I am staking out is directly
bound up in the new forms of exposure, unprotectedness, and human vulnerability,
and shifts in conceptions of what it is to be human. But rather than address these in
political and juridical terms, for example around themes of sovereignty and bio-power,
I want to explore some ways in which perceptual experience itself is being modified in
this contemporary field of events.
I’ve singled out what some might call hyperbolic examples, but if that is so they are not
disconnected from what have become normative trajectories and conditions elsewhere.
And one of those conditions can be characterized as a broad inscription of human life
into a homogenous global time without down-time, a milieu of continuous functioning,
of countless operations that are effectively ceaseless. It is a time that no longer passes,
beyond clock time. The catch phrase 24/7 is about a static redundancy that disavows
its relation to any measure of lived human duration. It connotes an arbitrary, uninflected
sense of a week, extracted from any sense of sustained or cumulative experience. For
example even to say ‘24/365’ is simply not the same; it introduces a unwieldy sugges-
tion of a temporality in which something could actually change, something unforeseen
could happen. Of course, as I indicated initially, much of the developed world has been
operating 24/7 for decades now, but it is only recently that the elaboration, the modeling
of one’s entire personal and social identity, is being reorganized to conform to the non-
stop operation of markets, information networks and other dominant systems. The 24/7
environment has the semblance of a social world but it is actually about a non-social
model of machinistic function that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain
its effectiveness. It is a time of indifference, aligned with what is inanimate or inert,
a time against which the fragility of human life is increasingly inadequate and within
which sleep has no necessity or inevitability. As an advertising exhortation it decrees the
absoluteness of availability and hence the ceaselessness of needs and their incitement,
and perpetual non-fulfillment.
Of course sleep, in its profound uselessness, its intrinsic passivity, with its incalculable lost
time of production, circulation and consumption, will always collide with the demands
of a non-stop 24/7 universe and be a site of crisis. The huge portion of our lives that we
spend asleep remains one of the great human affronts to modern economic life. Of the
seemingly irreducible ‘biological’ necessities of human life, sleep, unlike hunger and
sexual desire, is intrinsically at odds with the diverse processes of global moderniza-
tion. In spite of the military research I cited, it frustrates and confounds any strategies
to exploit or reshape it. The idea of a human need that can’t be financially harnessed
into an engine of profitability remains a monstrous anomaly. Certainly, then, it is no
surprise that sleep is under siege now everywhere, given the immensity of what is at
stake economically.
Modernity has made steady inroads against sleep – the average North American adult now
sleeps approximately six and half hours a night, an erosion from eight hours a genera-
tion ago, and (hard as it is to believe) down from ten hours in the early twentieth century.
[I grew up with the phrase we spend a third of our lives asleep as though it were an
axiom of natural history.] Thus sleeping pills are the primary exception to the otherwise
unprofitable down-time of sleep, though one well-known product hints at wider possibili-
ties: the new drug Ambien was recently discovered to have the side-effect of causing
extravagant somnambulant consumption of food. It is a ubiquitous but unseen reminder
of a pre-modernity that has never been fully overcome. The scandal of sleep, with its re-
lation to solar time, is the embeddedness in our lives of the rhythmic oscillations of light
and darkness, activity and rest, of work and recuperation, that the homogenizing ef-
fects of capitalism have eradicated or neutralized elsewhere. For several hundred years
sleep’s incompatibility with modernity was simply suspended, bracketed, as Descartes,
Hume and so many others consigned it to an effective oblivion, marginalized for its ut-
ter irrelevance to the operation of human reason. But that long-standing disregard is
less and less possible. In many ways sleep can be understood through Charles Taylor’s
account of modernization as the cumulative dismantling of any hierarchical or organic
models in which there is what he calls ‘an ontological status to a structure of differentia-
tion’. That is, following the terms of his argument, the modern world has arrived at a
point where persisting notions of sleep as somehow ‘natural’ are increasingly unaccept-
able. They are, in effect, a lingering survival of a pre-modern order arranged into binary
complementarities, whether of sacred/profane, the workaday world vs. carnival, or sleep
and waking. Of course people will continue to sleep, but it is now as an experience cut
loose from notions of necessity or nature. Instead it will become a managed function,
variable according to existing economic and institutional imperatives, a function that
can only be justified instrumentally.
Sleep is an unreasonable, unacceptable affirmation that there might be limits and thresholds
posed by living beings to the allegedly irresistible forces of modernization. One of the
familiar truisms of contemporary critical thought is that there are no unalterable givens
of nature – not even mortality, according to some. To insist otherwise, to believe that
there are any ‘essential’ features that distinguish living beings from machines is, we are
told, naive and nostalgic. What does it matter, many will insist, if new drugs could allow
someone to work at their job for a hundred hours straight? Couldn’t flexible sleeping
 10
allow more personal freedom, the ability to customize one’s life further in accordance
with special needs and desires? Wouldn’t less sleep allow more chance for ‘living life to
the fullest’? Some might object that human beings are meant to sleep at night, that our
own bodies are aligned with the daily rotation of our planet, to which the reply would
likely be: pernicious New Age nonsense, or even worse, an ominous yearning for some
kind of Heideggerian connectedness to the earth. And anyway, sleeping is for losers.
In the nineteenth century, following the worst abuses that accompanied industrialization in
Europe, factory owners and managers came to the realization that it would be more
profitable if workers were allowed modest amounts of rest time to enable them to be
more effective and sustainable producers in the long run, as Anson Rabinbach has well
shown in his work on the science of fatigue. But by the last decades of the 20th-century
and into the present, with the collapse of controlled or mitigated forms of capitalism in
the US and Europe, there has ceased to be any internal necessity for rest and recupera-
tion as components of economic growth and profitability. As Teresa Brennan, Susan
George and others have shown, time for human rest and regeneration is now simply too
expensive to be structurally possible within contemporary capitalism. For there is no
longer a single significant sphere or interlude of human existence (with the colossal ex-
ception of sleep) that has not been penetrated and taken over as work time, consump-
tion time, or marketing time. In the connexionist paradigm of contemporary capitalism,
outlined by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, there is the highest premium on activity,
without any clear distinction between personal and even leisure activity and profes-
sional activity. ‘To always be doing something, to move, to change – this is what enjoys
prestige, as against stability, which is often synonymous with inaction.’ And they stress
that this model of activity is not some transformation of an earlier work-ethic paradigm,
but is a profoundly new model of normality, and I would add a model that requires 24/7
temporalities for its realization.
Let me return briefly to the project mentioned at the beginning of my talk: the plan to launch
huge satellite reflectors as mirrors for solar light that would eliminate the darkness of
night-time has something preposterous about it, like a low-tech survival of a merely
mechanical scheme from Jules Verne or early 20th-century science fiction. In fact, the
first experimental launches were essentially failures – on one occasion the reflectors did
not unfold into position properly, and on the other a dense cloud cover over a test city
prevented a convincing demonstration of its capabilities. Nonetheless its ambitions might
seem to fit loosely within a broad set of panoptic practices developed over the last 200
years, specifically the luminous imperatives that were part of Bentham’s original model,
of flooding space with light, of eliminating shadows, as a precondition for effective con-
trol. But other kinds of satellites perform in far more sophisticated ways the operations of
actual surveillance and accumulation of information that descend in general terms from
Foucault’s articulation of the panoptic project. At stake with this particular enterprise is
not the broad possibility of spying and data acquisition enabled by non-optical scanners
and thermal sensors, but rather the continuation of older processes discussed by Wolf-
gang Schivelbusch in his study of 19th-century lighting, in which the broad deployment
of urban street lighting alleviated the various dangers associated with nocturnal darkness
and facilitated the time frame of many economic activities. As Albert Hirschman has
detailed, this twin promise of security and prosperity was from early on a key element in
accounts of how capitalism would improve the fabric of social existence for all.
In more general terms, the functioning of a 24/7 world corresponds to what Gilles Deleuze
called societies of control, in an influential text from 1990. Deleuze outlined how institu-
tional imperatives were beginning to regulate individual and social life in ways that were
continuous and unbounded, that effectively operated 24 hours a day, wherever one
happened to be. In a disciplinary society, forms of coercion and surveillance occurred
within specific sites, the school, the factory, the workplace and the family home, but
during the times and spaces moving between these sites one was relatively unmoni-
tored, during various intervals and in unregulated spaces that constituted the remnants
of everyday life. What Deleuze identified as new was the absence of gaps, of open
spaces and times, on which institutional imperatives did not impinge. Mechanisms of
command and effects of normalization, he saw, penetrated almost everywhere and at
all times, and became fully internalized, and internalized in a more comprehensive,
micrological way than disciplinary imperatives of the 19th- and earlier 20th-century. In
affluent sectors of the globe, what was once consumerism has expanded to a ceaseless
24/7 activity of techniques of personalization, of individuation, of machinistic interface,
and of mandatory communication. As Zygmunt Bauman has so well described, indi-
vidualization is the work we are all given, and we dutifully comply with the prescription
to refashion ourselves and our intricate identities continually, and may only dimly grasp
that to decline this work is not an option.
A range of recent work develops some of the themes of Deleuze’s model, including Bernard
Stiegler’s characterization of our immediate present as the era of hyper-industrialization,
not of some post-modernity. Its key feature is the increasing absence of any significant
time or space outside of information and communication networks. Their continuous
and ubiquitous effects have led to what Stiegler calls a mass synchronization of con-
sciousness and memory, because of the globalization of media products. He doesn’t
mean we are all consuming exactly the same things [particularization and modeling],
but he suggests that when work becomes permanent consumption, desire becomes
captured and channeled, and there is a massive decrease of singularity, of individual
participation and creativity in the making of the symbols we all exchange and share.
There are related concerns in the work of Paolo Virno, who has described the existence of an
endlessly functioning and expanding sphere of communication, production and circulation
11
of information. Within this, he sees the increasingly personalized consumption of a vast
array of technological products as generating what he calls ‘a publicness without a
public sphere’, an Arendt-like formulation. Virno voices the obligatory acknowledgment
of affirmative and emancipatory possibilities in the mass use of communication informa-
tion, but at the same time emphasizes the reality that there has in fact been no effective
mobilization, no political deployment of all the ways in which this non-stop time is spent,
no insurgent praxis derived from what he calls ‘mass-intellectuality’. The many capabili-
ties generated by urban, technological culture have mostly been complicit in maintain-
ing controlling societies. To amplify that notion of complicity, I will just mention how one
extremely influential individual has recently characterized these same capabilities and
tools. Dr Eric Schmidt is the CEO and chairman of Google, someone with a relatively
unusual background in both academia and Silicon Valley, including an undergraduate
degree from this university. Addressing other high-tech executives a few years ago, he
declared that the 21st-century will be synonymous with the ‘attention economy’ and that
the winners will be those who succeed in maximizing the number of ‘eyeballs’ they can
consistently control. The goal here is the continuous interface, not literally seamless,
but a relatively unbroken engagement with illuminated screens of diverse kinds that
ceaselessly solicit interest or response. Recent research has shown that the number of
people who wake themselves up once or more at night to check their e-mail or phone
messages is growing exponentially. And obviously Eric Schmidt’s model at Google is
the unrelenting collapsing of any separation between the personal and professional,
between entertainment and information, all overridden by a generalized and compulsory
functionality of communication that is inherently and inescapably 24/7.
It perhaps goes without saying that a 24/7 world is a disenchanted world, in its eradication
of shadows and obscurity, of alternate temporalities. It is a world identical to itself,
a world with the shallowest of pasts, and thus in principle a world without specters. But
the spectral character of modernity is bound up in the instability and fraudulence of a
bright, homogenous world with no mysteries. The spectral is in some way the intrusion
or disruption of the present by something out of time, the ghosts of what has not been
vanquished by modernity, the non-synchronous survival of past defeats, of unfulfilled
emancipation, of victims who will not be forgotten, and other dislocating experiences
of return and repetition. But part of its effect is to put in question the substance and
identity of the present and its apparent self-sufficiency.
One of the most prescient engagements with the spectral nature of later 20th-century moder-
nity is in Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. It is the story of several scientists on a spacecraft
orbiting an alien planet on a mission to observe possible signs of intelligent life. When
the activity of the planet seems to be inconsistent with scientific logic and theory they
bombard its surface with intense radiation, as a crude attempt to obliterate its unknow-
ability and its obscurity. In Solaris, amid the insomnia of the illuminated and artificial
12
environment of a space station are the conditions for the persistent appearance or
return of ghosts and hallucinations. One of the scientists quotes Cervantes: ‘Mankind
has lost the ability to sleep.’ This derelict and flattened-out technological world and its
cancellation of lived, diurnal time is an environment in which one’s psychic hold on
the stability of the present collapses and dreaming is relocated into waking life. But
for Tarkovsky it is the very survival and proximity of the spectral, and the living force
of remembrance, that allows one to remain human in an inhuman world, that makes
the condition of sleeplessness bearable. Coming as it did in the early stages of cultural
experiment in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, Solaris shows that to acknowledge and af-
firm, after repeated denials and repressions, these ghostly revenants is the only possible
gateway to the attainability of freedom or happiness.
That a state of permanent illumination, of exposure, becomes a symbol for a profoundly de-
politicized world should go without saying. I say this even accepting much of Jean-Luc
Nancy’s argument that exposure is necessarily a constituent of what an individual is, that
an individual can only be considered in relation to what is outside them. But against this
I will recall how Hannah Arendt repeatedly, over many years, used symbols of light and
visibility in her various accounts of what makes political life possible. For an individual
to have political effectiveness necessitated a balance, a moving back and forth between
the bright visibility of public activity and the protected, shielded sphere of the family or
private life, what she calls ‘the darkness of sheltered existence’; elsewhere she refers to
the ‘twilight which illuminated our private and intimate lives.’ Without that space or time
of privacy, away from ‘the implacable bright light of the constant presence of others on
the public scene,’ there could be no possibility of the nurturing of the singularity of the
self, a self that could make a substantive contribution to exchanges about the ‘common
good’. And for Arendt, the private sphere had to be distinct from the individual pursuit of
material happiness, in which the self is defined through acquisitiveness and what it con-
sumes. In the Human Condition she elaborated these two realms in terms of a balance
between exhaustion and regeneration: the exhaustion resulting from labor or activity in
the world, and the regeneration that regularly occurs within an enclosed domesticity.
But she saw the possibilities of such a balance profoundly threatened by the rise of an
economy in which ‘things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they
have appeared in the world,’ and writing in the midst of the Cold War 1950s she goes on
to say: ‘If we were truly nothing but members of a consumer society we would no longer
live in a world at all, [but would] simply be driven by a process in whose ever-recurring
cycles things appear and disappear.’
Within the larger issues I have raised thus far, what is crucial is the double and paradoxical
sense of sleep as a model for an optimum state on which power can operate with the least
political resistance, and sleep as a condition that finally cannot be instrumentalized or
controlled externally, that evades or frustrates the demands of global consumer society,
13 14

and that persists obstinately, as a figure of resistance and even of autonomy. Thus it
hardly needs to be said how the endless clichés in social critique and in art (from Wil-
liam Blake to Guy Debord, from Caligari to the Matrix) depend on a monolithic or fatuous
sense of sleep. But more seriously, it also should be said that no binary conceptualiza-
tion of sleep is either tenable or useful, in spite of the ways in which scientific theory has
contributed to new dualistic models. Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and Walter Benjamin are only a few of a large number of 20th-century
thinkers who have meditated on the profound ambiguity of sleep and the impossibility
of positioning it in any binary scheme. It may seem from what I’ve discussed so far that
I’ve been setting up a public-private dichotomy in order to pose sleep as emblematic of
the last remnants of a vanishing private realm. But even if such an argument might be
useful, it would be based on an insistence that the public and private are intrinsically
permeable, always in relations of shifting proximity and contiguity. For the larger thrust
of my argument is that, in the specific context of our own present, sleep can stand for
the durability of what constitutes the social; that sleep might be analogous to other re-
lated thresholds or barriers at which society might defend or protect itself. As the most
private, most enclosed, most vulnerable state common to all, sleep is therefore crucially
dependent on society for it to be sustained. For Hobbes, one of the vivid examples of the
insecurity of the state of nature is the defenselessness of the individual sleeper against
the numerous perils and predators to be feared on a nightly basis. Thus a rudimentary
obligation of the commonwealth is to provide security for the sleeper, both from actual
dangers and, equally importantly, from anxiety about danger. A number of fundamental
assumptions about what holds together a social world come together around the issue
of sleep – in the reciprocity between vulnerability and trust, between exposedness and
care – that is, the dependence on the care of others for the revivifying carelessness of
sleep, a periodic freedom from care that Barthes calls the ‘forgetfulness of evil’. As sleep
becomes increasingly encroached on and dispersed, it may become clearer how the
solicitude that is essential for the sleeper is not qualitatively different from the solicitude
that is drawn to more immediately obvious and acute forms of social suffering.
 Jonathan Crary received his Ph.D. from Columbia 1987 having previously grad-
uated with a B.A. from Columbia College, where he was an art history major.
He also earned a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute where he majored
in film/photography. He has taught full-time at Columbia since 1989, and has
also been a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard. He has written widely
on contemporary art and culture for publications and has also written critical
essays for over 25 exhibition catalogs. In 1986 he was one of the founders
(and continues to be co-editor) of Zone Books, a press now internationally
noted for its publications in intellectual history, art theory, politics, anthro-
pology and philosophy. Amongst other titles, he is the author of Techniques
of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990)
which has been translated into eight foreign languages. His book Suspen-
sions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture was published
in 2000 and was the winner of the 2001 Lionel Trilling Book Award. Profes-
sor Crary has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and has been a member of the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2005, his teaching and mentoring were
recognized with a Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award.

In 2006, Jonathan Crary was invited to give a lecture at MACBA in the context
of the seminar Another visuality. Discourse of display / display of discourse.
This lecture was entitled ‘On the Ends of Sleep: Shadows in the Glare of a
24/7 World.’

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Dossier grapat
Dosier grapado
Stapled Dossier

Enquadernació japonesa grapada

Encuadernación japonesa grapada
Stapled Japanese Binding

Enquadernació japonesa cosida

Encuadernación japonesa cosida
Sewed Japanese Binding

Llenceu aquest manual d’instruccions una vegada utilitzat (no enquadernar).

Desechar este manual de instrucciones una vez utilizado (no encuadernar).
Throw away this instructions manual once used (do not bind).

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